Algorand on IoT Gateway

General
1

Our engineer is advising that Algorand is one of the best proof-of-stake crypto options for use in an IoT network. We sell IoT Sensor and Gateway devices into a variety of applications and we are considering addition of a crypto node support to our Gateway to incentivize private citizens to install these Gateways within public spaces where they can support roaming sensors. This concept is not new. The Helium blockchain supports a “People’s Network” of such devices. Helium only supports simple sensors that acquire small data sets on rare occasion. We leverage much faster BLE and Wi-Fi HaLow sensor connections - supporting data streaming when required by applications including vibration analysis and even video. This leads to some general questions:

  • Can Algorand run effectively on ARM-based devices with much less RAM memory than typical miners (think 2 GHz, Quad-Core ARM with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of Flash memory)?
  • Does the Algorand API allow for us to enable a stake pool delegation amount based on things like the number of active Gateways (Algorand nodes) and the amount of Sensor data that these Gateways process?
  • Does Algorand have tech resources that are available for a conversation to answer the above questions and others that may pop up?

Thanks,

Mark J

2

Welcome to Algorand!

You will not be able to run a node with less than 2GB of RAM.
Running a node also requires significant amount of bandwidth, which most IoT devices would not be able to handle.

Why do you want to run a node as opposed to have the IoT sensor communicate with an API service or an external node?

There is no delegation of stake currently on Algorand.
Note also that there are no rewards associated with participating in the protocol: see General Frequently Asked Questions | Algorand Foundation

For any non-confidential question, we strongly recommend to use the following channels:

3

Hi @fabrice. I saw a few online data points suggesting I could run a Node on arm64, so I went ahead and setup a node using your Debian “Package Manager” setup steps. Everything appears to be running just fine.

I can issue “goal node status -d /var/lib/algorand” and get the following results (<> elements removed for security … perhaps unnecessarily):

Last committed block: 8034
Time since last block: 0.0s
Sync Time: 617.0s
Last consensus protocol: https://github.com/algorandfoundation/specs/tree/<guid?>
Next consensus protocol: https://github.com/algorandfoundation/specs/tree/<guid?>
Round for next consensus protocol: 8035
Next consensus protocol supported: true
Last Catchpoint:
Genesis ID: mainnet-v1.0
Genesis hash:

Is there another command that I can issue to confirm that my IoT Gateway is adequately functioning as a node (i.e. performance test or similar)?

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… I should have noted that I substituted arm64 for amd64 in the following setup step:
sudo add-apt-repository “deb [arch=amd64] https://releases.algorand.com/deb/ stable main”
The required repo was available.